A1 SD encoding quality mainconcept (vegas)
 

[couldn't decide which forum to put this in but thought I'd try the A1 / G1 owners first]

has anyone gotten quality they like out of the A1's SD using mainconcept (I'm using it from vegas)? I'm shooting in 60i SD widescreen, but am not yet happy w/ the vegas mpeg encodes even at highest quality (although is 1 pass VBR, but should be fine for this, using 6mbps).

I could try procoder (old copy) or squeeze, but am I the only one?

Also, my horizontal lines (edges) seem to exhibit a strange edge quality to them (or lack thereof).

Anyone encounter this? What are you using to encode?

I use a Mac, and I have noticed a little alaising or moire when down converted. The line twitter can be annoying. If you soften it a bit, the lines might go away, but I haven't tested it yet.
The A1 gets fabulous resolution out of SD and maybe too much in respects of moire visibility.

holly-

could u please explain more about your moire observations?

is the moire simply a more exaggerated form of moire or are more types of lines succombing to the moire effect?

could u perhaps post an example?

i am quite interested in the a1 and would like to get more hd work but my present bread and butter is sd. i would really appreciate any info as to how the a1 operates as an sd camera.

thanks so very much.

be well

rob

yes, b/c of the resolution, I would hope for nice results, and I'm not downconverting, afaik. recording in SD, then treating it as a regular DV avi file (even capturing it off my jcv dual deck, not the a1, which seems to work fine).

maybe I should shoot in HD and downconvert it, but without more testing, I'm a little hesitant to do that.. and for this would like to shoot 16:9 SD.. hmm...

sorry to keep updating my own post, but for what it's worth, I tried also encoding in procoder 1.5 and squeeze, and also tried viewing all on a SD monitor.

On an SD monitor, all of the encodes were indistinguishable from each other and of good quality for SD monitor and source.

I think what happens on a HD monitor, which some of my clients will have, is where the defects become magnified .. mosquito noise on the main concept, etc. The procoder is a softer look, so that helps hide some of the 'blemishes' of the SD source, and give a nice look IMO. Squeeze was better IMO than the main concept.

The moire thing is weird and very noticable to me..we'll see if others notice it and there may not be much I can do about it.

Well, at least I feel better that my shoot will look decent on an SD monitor, and well, for those with hi def sets, they'll just need to buy hi def dvd players! :-)

Edit: Mods feel free to move to vegas or post prod. forum if that makes sense - sorry for any trouble..wasn't sure where this thread would (will) go.

While many HD monitors will do a nice job with HD content, looking at SD on one is another story altogether. I have yet to see one that looked anywhere as nice as a pro CRT for SD.

yup!

although since some people will be viewing this on hi def sets, I think they will think the flaws are because of the way I did the project, so I'm just trying to see how that will go. saving grace is that they know from looking at SD TV on hi def, that unless the source is hi def, it looks terribleor ok at best.

they may not realize that DVD's are still only SD, and will probably assume that if it's on disk, and the DVD player is hooked up to their HD set, it will look hi def. maybe I should put a link to a small but not obnoxious disclaimer page/ text. IMO the hi def really starts to show the differences in encoding (and there's no way I can touch the encoding done for commercial DVDs).